David Figlio, Jim Spillane, Carol Lee Named to Edu-Scholar Public Influence Ranking

David Figlio, Jim Spillane, Carol Lee Named to Edu-Scholar Public Influence Ranking

School of Education and Social Policy professors David Figlio, James Spillane and Carol Lee were named to the Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings for 2014. Frederick Hess, the American Enterprise Institute director of education and an Education Week blogger, developed these rankings to honor the 200 university-based education scholars who had the biggest influence on the nation's education discourse last year.

Among all scholars in the nation, David Figlio ranked number 69, Spillane ranked 79 and Carol Lee ranked number 119.

According to Hess, the rankings identify the scholars who are “contributing most substantially to public debates about education,” offering a “useful, if imperfect,” gauge of public influence. The rankings reflect both their academic work and their public presence last year.

The rubric for calculating the 2014 rankings includes the following seven metrics:

Google Scholar score, based on the number of articles, books or papers that are widely cited

Book points for books authored, co-authored or edited

Highest Amazon ranking, based on the author's highest-ranked book on Amazon

Education press mentions, reflecting the number of mentions in Education Week or the Chronicle of Higher Education

Blog mentions, a score for the number of times a scholar was quoted, mentioned or otherwise discussed in blogs

Newspaper mentions, for the number of times a scholar was quoted or mentioned in U.S. newspapers

Congressional Record mentions, identifying whether a scholar had testified or if their work was referenced by a member of Congress

Klout score, a score for online presence for Twitter activity

Figlio is the Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy, the director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an associate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His research on education and social policy, including influential work on school accountability, standards, welfare policy and policy design, has been published in numerous leading journals and funded by major agencies and foundations.

Spillane is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change and the chair of the Human Development and Social Policy doctoral program at the School of Education and Social Policy. He is also a professor of Learning Sciences and a faculty associate at the Institute for Policy Research. Spillane’s work explores the policy implementation process at the state, school district, school and classroom levels.

An expert in school leadership and educational policy, he is the author of several books, including Distributed Leadership and Diagnosis and Design for School Improvement.

Lee is the Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern. She is a former president of the American Education Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the National Conference of Research on Language and Literacy, and a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. She is also the author of two books, Culture, Literacy and Learning and Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation. Several major awards have recognized her contributions to education.